Echo Nest, founded by two M.I.T. Ph.D. graduates, provides "big data" analysis of music and provides this data to consumer-facing music services such as Clear Channel’s iHeartRadio, eMusic, MOG, Spotify, Nokia, the BBC and VEVO. The company has more than 15,000 developers using its data for apps.

Echo Nest is also announcing "Fanalytics," a service that provides new in depth analysis of the every person of a music service, including the person's music collection, listening habits and other factors. Then applications can match similar profiles. In addition, the service can provide "affinity prediction," in other words, predict how music preferences predict political affiliation--or perhaps eventually other consumer habits such as purchasing or brand preferences.

Jeff Crowe, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, says Echo Nest's analysis of its database of 30 million songs allows it to provide a variety of services that no one else has. "They can create dynamic playlists for you. We think over time more and more music will be streamed online," Crowe says. Unlike Pandora, this analysis of songs is all done automatically, Crowe says.

Using this data, developers and music companies can make better decisions about what songs to play and what their users want, Crowe says. More and more music companies are using Echo Nest to provide this data, he says.